Cultivating Creative Community
All in Truth
Play is an essential, but often forgotten aspect of life. We leave it behind when we enter the serious business of adulthood and too often forget to pick it up again. We go for long stretches of time, working hard and persevering with one thing and another — projects and people. In particularly weary and anxious seasons, I often recognize in myself a longing to experience something completely other. It begins to well up inside until I feel I could burst from the need for a change.
I’ve been possessed by the archiving bug for most of my life. I’m terrible at throwing away anything that represents a piece of personal or family history. Mementos from my children and grandchildren, old negatives from the days before digital photos, desk calendars with a year of life scheduled in the pages, cards and letters — basically anything that has significance for me or my family story must be kept. That inclination, along with the urge to write, led me to the pages of diaries and journals.
The distraction helps me forget the silver eyebrow, wayward twin of Normal. But I return to my departing gate and the young man remains where I left him. I cannot shake his innocuous but jarring irregularity, a feature allowing his face to hold the paradox of innocence and experience together in tension. Somehow he stands between the woman with the cane for whom the airport is a veritable gauntlet, and the young couple who could circumnavigate it all day and get up tomorrow to do it again. He wears on the outside what we get to hide from, put off, or ignore: our own slow march toward greater imperfection, and then, the end. It’s not about age; it’s about control.Learning to hear has been a lifelong process for me, and the better I think I get, the more I know I miss. Part of it is like sorting one’s way through a blanket of static, desperately trying to pick out words of life in a cacophony of noise that seems designed to inflame rather than inform, to distract instead of clarify. But most of my problem is hubris, a deep-seated confidence that in something so ordinary and easy as hearing I have little to learn.
Early on a Thursday morning two weeks ago, I gathered my bags and hit the road for Laity Lodge's annual artist retreat, including Art House America founders and friends. Eight hours and a triple-shot latte later, I turned off Highway 83 and eased the car down a gravel road. Hand-carved signs punctuated the progression of slopes and curves leading down into the canyon, asking me to slow down. At the bottom of the canyon, the road disappeared into a river. I stopped to double-check the driving directions. “Turn left into the river . . . ”
I’m six months pregnant with my first child and nesting like there’s no tomorrow. Nesting takes many forms for me: cleaning, painting, sorting, shredding, and acquiring. A substantial portion of the process involves acquiring books — books about pregnancy, nutrition, labor and birth, baby development, philosophies of child-raising, and how to love a child as part of our family, our church, our neighborhood, and the world.
Almost two years ago exactly, I entered the Art House for the first time. Like someone who had been there a hundred times before, I came in through the kitchen door and sat down at the Great White Table (the best place in the house). I had recently made the career transition from politics to entertainment through my job with the Wedgwood Circle and our team was in Nashville to help co-host a musician retreat at the Art House.I have a friend who wryly describes herself as a bad Buddhist. This makes me smile. I think of Dustin Hoffman’s character in the film Little Big Man and the many vocations he pursued over a lifetime: Caucasian Cherokee, drunk, gunslinger, muleskinner, liar, and more. With each one he describes his performance as horribly lacking. Can you hear the actor’s voice? I was a horrible drunk. I was a horrible liar. Well, I was a horrible Zen Buddhist.
The dreams and debates of modernity, cascading as they are into postmodernity, are always at the heart of the human condition. It cannot be otherwise, as we are never more and never less than sons of Adam and daughters of Eve. So we take our place as folks who long to love and to be loved. Percy understood that with an unusual eye: historically, philosophically, psychologically, politically, and, yes, theologically, seeing the complexity for Everyman and Everywoman. We want love, yet we also know how hard it is to love and to be loved.
My parents raised me for fourteen years. No more, no less. That may seem like an odd thing to say but it’s true. Some kids don’t get that much time. All you have to do is go to the grocery store or a fast food place to find out what I mean. Shifty eyes, mumbled grunts, manners in retreat, unclean hands, inability to count change. I’m grateful for the fourteen good years of proper parenting I had. Then Jack Kerouac took over. He was a lousy parent. As suburban shamans go, you couldn’t do better. Jack Kerouac, writer and former football star, was a game-changer.
A few weeks back I was privileged to sit with trustworthy friends and wrestle, yet again, to find the smallest, most potent words to describe what Art House means. This kind of exercise has played out many times in the last twenty years. We’ve been trying to put our vision into words since we first imagined the place and purpose that became The Art House home in Nashville, and our non-profit, Art House America. As we like to say, the name Art House designates place, while Art House America is an organizational title.
